Zero Tolerance Changes Life At On School

By JOHN LELAND

Published: April 8, 2001

MOUNTAIN LAKES, N.J.—
IN the high school cafeteria, Bobby Fullman and Julie Morrison talked about zero tolerance and a prank that went wrong.

Julie, 17, is an athletic blonde, on the tennis team and the vice president of the senior class. Bobby, 16, is a junior, with close-cropped hair and quick brown eyes.

Some months ago, they sent a note to a girl in the freshman class, stringing together random passages from a history text. Some were meaningless arcana. One mentioned prophecy; one mentioned Hitler. The next thing Bobby and Julie knew, they were in the principal's office.

Both students have been in the school system of this small, affluent suburb since first grade. ''If you look at us, we don't have bad reputations,'' Julie said.

But in the wake of the April 20, 1999, tragedy at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., where two students in trench coats fatally shot 12 of their classmates and a teacher, Mountain Lakes High School, like many others around the country, adopted a policy of zero tolerance to bullying, violence or threats. The words ''prophetic'' and ''Hitler'' in the note set off an alarm. The two students were interviewed by the principal, Lewis Ludwig, then sent to the school psychologist for evaluation.

''He asked, did we hear voices,'' Bobby recalled, derisively. '' 'Does Jesus tell you to do things?' '' After the psychologist decided they were not dangerous, they were allowed to return to class. But Julie was bothered by the automatic nature of the process -- how, once it got started, she and Bobby were judged not by their reputations or histories, but by fears generated by students in distant schools. ''Zero tolerance means well,'' she said, ''but harms a lot of people doing things innocently.''

Mountain Lakes, about 30 miles west of New York City, is a small hamlet of old stucco houses and man-made lakes, where neighbors like to consider their good schools an* community ties as barriers against the strife of the world. Twenty-four years ago, I was a senior at this high school. A generation later, when deadly shootings at suburban high schools began to fill the news, the cast of characters was instantly familiar: the bullies and geeks, the jocks and stoners. The isolation and revenge fantasies rang familiar as well -- everything but the deadly outcomes.

After the shootings last month in suburban Santee, Calif., I went back to Mountain Lakes for clues to what had changed. In this typical American high school, were the hallway social patterns or student values shifting to make the unthinkable thinkable? What were the ripple effets of Columbine and other incidents in a school hundreds, even thousands of miles away?

More than 50 students, teachers, parents, administrators and police officers described a subtly altered high school landscape, with a new set of fears, rules and penalties.

To go by the numbers, American schools are safer than they have been in years. A report by the Juvenile Law Center, a nonprofit organization in Philadelphia, noted that students are three times as likely to be hit by lightning as to be killed by violence in school. But the tide of school shootings has caused Mountain Lakes, like other suburban schools, to shed its sense of privileged immunity.

Though the school rarely has more than two or three fistfights in a year, violence at other schools has lodged itself in the town discourse. ''All you hear about is trench coat murders and school safety, all because of Columbine,'' said Joe Guadara, 16, a sophomore who was suspended under zero tolerance. ''It's ruining the high school experience for me.''

In the cafeteria, the social order followed familiar topographic lines: the jocks in one area, the brains in another, the drama club over by the windows. A sodden French fry sailed from one table to the next, a lethal projectile, but only if swallowed.

Even before Columbine, some drama members wore black trench coats, and now some students refer to them as the trench coat mafia. The members receive this with aggrieved condescension.

Backpacks lie unattended in the hallways, a gesture of trust possible in a homogeneous student body of just 550. Nobody locks his or her locker. But some of the old certainties have been shaken. Since Columbine, teachers sit by all the school entrances to monitor comings and goings. The middle school basketball team changed its name from the Bullets to the Lakers. The high school chess coach told a student he could no longer say ''prepare to die'' before defeating his opponent.

Justin Lyon, 18, a senior, surveyed the bustling, nearly all-white sprawl of the cafeteria, viewing it against images from towns like Santee or Littleton. The cliques were not so rigid here, he said. The bullying was rarely so severe. But still, he could imagine. ''You see those people on TV,'' he said. ''You think, 'I know kids just like that.' ''

High school culture is no longer just local, its reference points confined to the building or the surrounding district. A fashion shown on MTV will appear in Utah or Louisiana in the same week; a school shooting in Southern California may echo in Westchester County.